I just saw this on slashdot. Sounds like a good way to get rid of our board making waste. Here the little article uncase the link goes down
[/url]
Quote:
There’s an old joke that if you were reincarnated, you might want to come back as a Styrofoam cup.
Why? Because they last forever. Ba-dum-bum.
Despite being made 95 percent of air, Styrofoam’s manufactured immortality has posed a problem for recycling efforts. More than 3 million tons of the durable material is produced every year in the United States, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Very little of it is recycled.
Help may come from bacteria that have been found to eat Styrofoam and turn it into useable plastic. This is the stuff recycling dreams are made of: Yesterday’s cup could become tomorrow’s plastic spoon.
Kevin O’Connor of University College Dublin and his colleagues heated polystyrene foam, the generic name for Styrofoam, to convert it to styrene oil. The natural form of styrene is in real peanuts, strawberries and a good steak. A synthetic form is used in car parts and electronic components.
Anyway, the scientists fed this styrene oil to the soil bacteria Pseudomonas putida, which converted it into biodegradable plastic known as PHA (polyhydroxyalkanoates).
PHA can be used to make plastic forks and packaging film. It is resistant to heat, grease and oil. It also lasts a long time. But unlike Styrofoam, PHA biodegrades in soil and water.
The process will be detailed in the April 1 issue of the American Chemical Society journal Environmental Science & Technology.
It’s not a first. It’s been known for quite some time that there are types of bacteria that break down hydrocarbons…they don’t do it QUICKLY or anything, but they do accomplish this feat. Usually controlled oxidative processes that allow the bugs a site to work on, then they keep chewing away at the rest of the molecule.
Hey; anything is possible in the bacterial realm; what; no oxygen and no light? Let’s move over to these deep-sea vents, adapt to run on sulphur and flourish in these near boiling temperatures! No Prollem! Hey there’s this super nasty new antibiotic that’s gonna wipe us all out! Oh, we can deal with that; just a point mutation here, another one there and blammo; we’re in the clear.
Bactaeria are perhaps the most amazingly adaptable organisms on the face of the planet. If you knew what the large pharma companies were doing to them to carry out VERY difficult chemical reactions for them you’d be mind-boggled…
It may very well be the other way around. Heat, sulfur, and no light first then adaptation to light, oxygen, and whatever. Some of the bacteria they found in the Great Pyramids had been dormant for 3000 years. Put em in a little nutrient broth and they start respirating and replicating. Mike
It’s been known for quite some time that there are types of bacteria that break down hydrocarbons…
They actually use bcateria to clean up oilspill in some areas(specially warm ones…duh). So no real surprise there is on that can live of polystyrene. The oddity would be that it ‘converts’ it to another plastic…